Theories of Memory: Developing a Canon

Ariela Freedman
Concordia University, Montreal

Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, eds. Theories of Memory: A Reader.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007. x, 304 pp. $65.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

diting anthologies is a daunting and frequently thankless task. The editors are
faced with strict space limitations and a tremendous amount of material for
potential inclusion; the work is like having to create a representative puddle
out of a boundless sea. When the anthology represents both the history of an idea
and a new theoretical focus, as Theories of Memory: A Reader does, the difficulty
is compounded by the relative novelty of the endeavor. Michael Rossington and
Anne Whitehead, the editors of the anthology, present the book as a comprehensive survey of theories of memory from the classical period to the present day
(13), giving themselves the task, in just over three hundred pages, of identifying
and representing the canonical works on memory in the Western tradition, and
outlining the cutting edge of memory studies today.
Theories of Memory is published as a consequence of and in response to what
the editors call the memory boom of the last decades of the twentieth century. In
the 1980s and 1990s, a new interdisciplinary scholarly interest in memory began
to have a significant impact on literary studies. The memory boom of the eighties
and nineties has, in the new century, begun to see signs of institutionalization and
canonization. In addition to the many books and articles published on the subject
of memory, a large number of university classes at the undergraduate and graduate
levels have taken memory as their focus. Many academic programs and institutes
now offer memory studies as a concentration. In fact, this anthology is prefaced
with a trace of its pedagogic origin, as the editors note its emergence from the MA
in Literary Studies: Writing, Memory, Culture, taught in the School of English
Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. The editors offer a
number of explanations for this surge of interest (5) in memory: an emergent
re-engagement with theories of memory in the fields of holocaust studies, postcolonialism and poststructuralism; technological developments that have led to
a sophisticated engagement with and theorization of virtual memory (5); new
archival access to the suppressed histories of the Cold-War era in the former Soviet
Union and the United States; the debates around false memory syndrome in the
early 1990s; and Truth and Reconciliation commissions founded in South Africa,

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Guatemala and Chile tasked with the memory work of discovering and narrating
past wrongdoings in the interest of national peace, justice and resolution. The capaciousness and variety of this list should begin to indicate both the excitement and
difficulty of the field. Judged by a certain lens, almost anything can be considered
to come under the purview of memory studies, and the category has the potential
to become so expansive that it is nearly meaningless.
The new journal Memory Studies, which first appeared in January 2008,
concentrates on the possibilities and dangers of this omnivorous expansiveness.
Founded to afford recognition, form, and direction to work in this nascent field,
and provide a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical
and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory
today (5), the journal has clear professional goals as well as academic ones. It
envisions its role as legitimating a field of study as well as providing a framework
for its development. However, the articles in the inaugural issue share a common
anxiety about the expansiveness of the field and its multidisciplinary but not
quite interdisciplinary nature. Indeed, some prominent names in memory studies,
including Wulf Kansteiner and Pierre Nora, have been suspicious of the upsurge in
popularity of memory studies, conscious of the problem of defining and containing the multiple ways of understanding the forms and functions of the past, and
critical of the contemporary fetishization of memory that has its correlative in the
development of this academic field.
Anthologies play a key role in the definition of new areas and fields of study;
they serve as introductions for new students and emerging scholars, and begin to
define a canon for the field. Theories of Memory is not quite the first anthology on
memory, but it is the first to define itself in exclusively theoretical and academic
terms. The Anatomy of Memory, published over a decade ago, provided a fascinating, wide-ranging and eccentric collection of readings on memory, but without a
theoretical focus. To The Anatomy of Memory we can add two more recent popular
anthologies: The Vintage Book of Amnesia edited by Jonathan Lethem, which flips
the problem of memory around to the related problem of forgetting, and Memory:
An Anthology, edited by A.S. Byatt and Harriet Wood, which contains a mixture of
canonical writings and recent essays on the subject of memory. These are popular
anthologies, and meant for the common reader more than the classroom. By contrast, Theories of Memory is clearly designed for classroom use, and at times has the
definite flavor of the modified course pack. Theories of Memory is broken up into
three parts, with a distinctly postmodern slant; about half the book is devoted to
theory published within the last thirty years. This contemporary emphasis makes
the anthology probably most useful to students and scholars interested in current theory and cultural studies. Indeed, the anthology diverges from its focus on
memory studies in its final section in order to include readings that are at times
only tangentially or indirectly related to problems of memory. The editors note that
this final section includes some more unexpected choices in order to broaden the
scope of current memory studies in what we feel to be productive directions (13).
That is, the anthology intends not just to represent key voices in memory studies,

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but also to nudge scholars to consider questions of gender, race, diaspora and nation
as part of the purview of this rapidly expanding field. This choice to be ambitious
and inclusive is somewhat problematic in an anthology on a vast topic that is just
over three hundred pages. By pushing the boundaries of the field and including
some work only tentatively related to the explicit theorization of memory, other
important work is invariably left out. This strategy also leaves the impression that
any field of study can be considered memory studies if framed as such. The cutting
edge begins to look like a slow dissolve.
Theories of Memory is organized chronologically, with each subsection introduced and edited by a different guest editor. Part I, Beginnings, introduces
central positions in thinking about memory (13) through a section on Classical
and Early Modern Ideas of Memory, introduced by Jennifer Richards. Richards
points out that two emphases are shared within these periods: first, the idea that
memory is an active process which is defined by the two activities of collection
and recollection, of storing and retrieval; second, that these activities constitute the
basis of knowing and understanding (2021). Selections from Plato, Aristotle and
Cicero outline Greek and Roman theories of memory, while chapters from Carruthers and Yates describe the development of the Medieval and Renaissance arts
of memory as extended from the classical tradition. Richards moves us, then, from
the dialectical presentation of memory as contrasted with rhetorical training, to
the mobilization of techniques of memory as the cornerstone of the rhetorical arts.
Michael Rossington edits the next subsection, on Enlightenment and
Romantic Memory, and charts the shift from the classical understanding of
memory as a process of collection and retrieval and as a basis for knowledge, to the
connection of memory to enlightenment and romantic discourses on identity, selfhood and imagination, through selections from Locke, Hume and Hegel. Locke,
Rossington writes, recasts memory such that it is less a place than a function of
the mind, (71) a critical element in the cultivation of individual identity and critical self-consciousness. Hume, in selections from A Treatise of Human Nature, calls
attention to the difficult tension between memory in relation to imagination in
contrast to Hegel who, Rossington argues, employs a theory of memory that enlists
imagination to rescue images from the night-like mine or pit (73).
Beginnings ends with a section on Memory and Late Modernity, edited
by Rossington and Whitehead, which represents a period thick with rich and provocative re-engagements with memory through selections from Marx, Nietzsche,
Bergson, Freud and Benjamin. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx
advocates a turning against memory while acknowledging the spectral hauntings (92) that continue to shape the present in the farcical repetition of the past.
Nietzsche displays a similar suspicion of historic sensibility while maintaining
that a dialectical tension between memory and forgetting, or between past and
future, is essential for what he terms life (93). In Matter and Memory, Bergson
argues that there are two primary forms of memory, though they rarely occur in
isolation: habit memory, which consists in obtaining certain automatic behavior
by means of repetition and pure memory, which refers to the survival of personal

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memories in the unconscious (93). Freuds essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing
Pad pictures the process of memory in a revision of Platos metaphor, and turns
the wax tablet into a palimpsest subject to multiple transcriptions, while Benjamins
essay on Proust emphasizes Prousts textum as a memory web in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a Penelope work of recollection (120)
where memory and forgetting play an interdependent part.
So far, so canonical, although there are a number of major figures that are
missed, including Augustine, Rousseau, and Montaigne (I will later return to
some of these omissions). In the second half of the book the selections become
more recent, and perhaps more controversial. The second section of the book, titled
Positionings, presents major positions within recent and contemporary literary
studies through which memory is defined and debated (13). Michael Rossington
begins with a section on Collective Memory, writing that the twentieth-century
and contemporary preoccupation with cultural as opposed to, or in dialogue with,
individual memory may be seen as a response to some influential late-nineteenth
and early twentieth-century literary, philosophical and psychological expositions
of the nature of recollection (134). In the accounts of sociologists and cultural
historians who study collective memory, the individual turns out to be inseparable from collective remembrance and collective memory occupies an important
function, distinct from history, in conceiving of a societys past (134). Rossington
starts the section with Halbwachs last work, La Mmoire Collective (1950), which
explores the collective and multiple aspect of the frameworks of social memory
and contrasts such frameworks with the singular principle of history (135) and
follows Halbwachs with the 1989 essay Between Memory and History: Les Lieux
de Mmoire by the French historian Pierre Nora. Rossington ends with John Frows
riposte to Nora in his essay Toute la mmoire du monde: Repetition and Forgetting (1997), where he writes that a nostalgic and auratic treatment of memory
is surely no longer tenable. It is not a useful tool for conceptualizing the social
organization of memory; it provides no mechanism for identifying its technological underpinnings; and it cannot account for the materiality of signs and of the
representational forms by which memory is structured (151).
Anne Whitehead edits and introduces the next two sections, on Jewish
Memory Discourse and Trauma. She begins with an extract from Zachor: Jewish
History and Jewish Memory on Jewish historical writing in the Middle Ages by the
historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who strikingly places memory at the heart of
the Jewish faith and tradition (161). This extract is followed by the introduction
to Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarins book From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, about the hundreds of yizker-bikher, memorial books
devoted to the lives and deaths of entire Jewish communities in Eastern Europe
(172) that serve as invaluable historical documents charting the history and folklore of vanished communities and also as ritual works intended to commemorate
and bear witness in a genre that comes out of a long tradition of Jewish mourning
literature. The section closes with James E. Youngs introduction to The Texture of
Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993) which argues that both the

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reasons for memory and the forms memory takes are always socially mandated,
part of a socializing system whereby fellow citizens gain common history through
the vicarious memory of their forebears experience (182).
Whitehead also introduces the next section, entitled Trauma, which
includes selections from Lawrence Langers Admitting the Holocaust (1995), Cathy
Caruths essay on Beyond the Pleasure Principle from her edited collection Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (1995) and Dominick LaCapras critique of Caruth from
History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004). Whitehead links
the concept of trauma to the advent of modernity (186) and presents trauma
studies as linked to the study of the holocaust but extending beyond it. But it is
difficult to separate Jewish memory discourse from trauma theory, since the legacy
of the holocaust has served as the founding cataclysm for trauma theory, and since
the two of the three writers represented in this section, Lawrence Langer and
Dominick LaCapra, are perhaps best known for their work in Holocaust studies.
Perhaps a merging of these two sections might have made room for a section on
technological memory and prosthetic memory, a key concern in memory studies
that is here wholly unrepresented.
But it is the final section, Identities, that goes furthest afield from the editors stated goal of historicizing or theorizing memory (14). The first section,
on Gender edited and selected by Kate Chedgzoy, at least tries to keep to the
unifying theme of memory by selecting readings that focus on womens relations to, and uses of, the practices and discourses of autobiographical and cultural
memory (217). Chedgzoy argues that women have been underrepresented in the
burgeoning field of memory studies, and that memory is subject to gendered and
power-laden dynamics (217) that demand that the interrelations of gender and
memory (216) be explored. Chador provides extracts of Anna Readings book The
Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (2002), which asks if
womens testimonies are treated differently than mens and if women privilege different elements in what they remember and what they forget. Chedgzoy is followed
by Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smiths essay Feminism and Cultural Memory:
An Introduction, which argues that Feminist studies and memory studies both
presuppose that the present is defined by a past that is constructed and contested,
emphasize the situatedness of the individual and demonstrate that the content,
sources, and experiences that are recalled, forgotten or suppressed are of profound
political significance (226). The section concludes with Annette Kuhns autobiographical and critical work Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1999),
a book that mixes the personal and political in an example of both memory work
and feminist practice.
I am not convinced that these are the most important readings for students
or scholars new to memory studies to undertake, but they are relevant and they
do represent an interesting direction for memory studies. But the next section, on
Race/Nation is even more tangentially connected. Pablo Mukherjee includes
selections from Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1991), Etienne Balibars The Nation Form: History and Ideology (2002) and Paul Gilroys There Aint

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No Black in the Union Jack (2002); worthy selections all, but perhaps more suitable
for an anthology on race and nationalism. The final section, on Diaspora is also
weakly linked to memory studies, with jargon-heavy selections from Victor Burgins
Indifferent Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996), Avtar Brahs Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996) and Edward Saids autobiography
Out of Place: A Memoir (2000). This is not to say that studies of gender, race, nation
and diaspora are not connected to questions of memory and forgetting; they are
obviously and integrally linked to the problem of memory in ways that demand
attention. But they are not the most obvious or pressing choices for an anthology
on memory, and these sources are widely available. By structuring the anthology to
culminate in a section on identity, the editors seem to collapse memory studies into
identity politics, and scant much of the interesting and critical work on memory
that they do not have the room to include.
The sweeping scope of the anthology is almost certainly a consequence of the
editorial decision to have each of the subsections introduced and edited by different contributing editors, which creates a certain unevenness, both in the criteria of
selection and in the thoroughness of the introductions. Some of the contributing
editors do an excellent job introducing their sections; their introductions provide a
survey of the field, and a bibliography that can be used as a key for further reading.
Other introductions are more perfunctory and provide skeletal reading lists that
do not even gesture towards coverage of the field. The anthology could have used
a more consistent editorial policy for the contributing editors, and a substantial
bibliography listing the key primary and secondary readings on memory at the
end of the book. One of the most useful services an anthology on a subject this
broad can provide is to point to all of the work it cannot include. Some of the
introductions do this, but inconsistently, and with many noticeable omissions.
There are also a number of noticeable omissions in the primary sources here
excerpted. It is nice to see selections from Mary Carrutherss and Frances Yatess
wonderful books on Medieval and Renaissance memory, but it would have perhaps been even more helpful to have a primary source between Cicero and John
Locke. A number of critics essays address memory and the Holocaust (Kugelmass,
Boyarin, Young, Langer, LaCapra) but none of the excellent related work by critics who write on memory and the First World War (Fussell, Winter) is included.
The recent selections that make up half the volume include a majority of English
and American critics, with a few works translated from the original French. This
leaves out Douwe Draaisma, Andreas Huyssen and W.G. Sebald, among other
major contemporary thinkers. And it is repeatedly surprising that Western studies
of memory begin with Plato and Aristotle without including at least some reference to the Hebrew Bible, the first book to present memory as an imperative and
a commandment.
In addition to the problems of selection in an anthology on a topic this broad,
there is the problem of abridgement. The included selections are all quite short; the
longest, from Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities, is eleven pages, while
Plato gets only three. There is, of course, an obvious incentive to keep the readings

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brief, since shorter excerpts allow the editors to include more voices while keeping
the book, at $29.95 for the paperback, relatively affordable. Yet some of the excerpts
are so condensed as to be almost unusable, and the choice of where to abridge is
at times quite surprising. The excerpt from Platos Theaetetus, for instance, includes
the famous metaphor of the memory as a block of wax, that is comparatively pure
or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right
consistency (25). But it stops short of the metaphor that displaces the block of wax
in Platos account, the aviary, although it is worth noting that Plato is not satisfied
with the metaphor of the aviary either, and that the dialogue ends without a full
conclusion. In other words, by presenting not one but multiple metaphors for the
workings of memory, and by successfully dismissing and displacing them, Plato
gives us not a static image but a moving target. By reproducing only a fragment of
the dialogue, and only the most well-worn metaphor, the editors incorrectly give
the impression of a simplicity and consistency in Platos model of memory that
simply does not exist. Similarly, the sections from the Phaedrus reproduce the
myth of the invention of writing by the God Teuth, but do not include the famous
subsequent dialogue on the relationship of memory to writing, later deconstructed
by Derrida in his influential essay Platos Pharmacy. (And why is Derrida, whose
work repeatedly returned to the problem of memory, not included in this anthology?) Freud is probably the most drastically bowdlerized figure here; his theory of
memory is entirely represented by the brief essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad. This is a shame, not only because Freud, perhaps more than any other
thinker, revitalized and defined the theoretical study of memory for the twentieth
century, but also because the later excerpts on trauma by Caruth, LaCapra and
Langer rely on a preliminary knowledge of work by Freud that is not included or
even adequately referenced in this compendium.
But perhaps Rossington and Whiteheads most critical editorial decision is
their choice to distinguish between literary and theoretical material, and to omit
literary texts. The introductory essay of Theories of Memory begins with the long and
famous quotation from the overture of la recherche du temps perdu describing the
famous revelation prompted by the first taste of the madeleine dipped in tea, a taste
that opens up the vast structure of recollection articulated and embodied by the
novel. The quotation is perhaps an obvious choice for the beginning of an anthology on memory but is certainly a sensible one; more surprising is that this is the
last of Proust we see. The end of the introduction addresses this editorial decision,
In the interests of maintaining coherence and focus, we decided from the outset to limit
the extracts in the volume to theoretical writing that addresses memory, thus omitting literary inclusions. This was an economy that we felt to be necessary, although we
recognize that important theories of memory are inextricably embedded in versions of
the literary, from Augustine through Rousseau to Proust and beyond. (14)

This is an interesting but problematic editorial decision. Neither McConkey nor

Byatt and Wood distinguish between theory and literature, and we would do
well to remind ourselves that this distinction postdates many of the writers here

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included, and is still sharply contested. The theories of memory embedded in

Augustine, Rousseau and Proust, among others here not named, have been formative and central in the development of theories of memory; it is difficult to corral
the theoretical from the literary even in the purposes of economy, and particularly
when talking about memory. It is clear, too, that Proust intended his novel to be
a theory of memory as well as a literary endeavor. Indeed, after Freuds, Prousts
theory of memory is probably the most influential and the most sophisticated of
the twentieth century. The editors put themselves in the potentially problematic
position of including ten pages of Benjamins essay on Proust, but after that token
epigraph in the introduction, no Proust at all. On the other hand, the last selection of the book, a section from Edward Saids memoir Out of Place, is literary by
any definition, and presents no theory of memory though it is of course, a work of
memory. What justifies the inclusion of Benjamin on Proust but no Proust, or of
Saids memoir but not Augustine, Rousseau, Nabokov or Sebalds quasi-memorial,
quasi-theoretical fictions?
The distinction between literary and theoretical work on memory may be
particularly puzzling to scholars of the twentieth century, since so many major
modernist authors present compelling theories of memory that deliberately and
persuasively trouble the distinction between the literary and the theoretical. The
modernist obsession with memory prefigures and provokes the collapse of belief
in the reliability or objectivity of memory, and the fragmentation of memory
discourses into multiple combating narratives and into elaborations of conscious
simulacrums of the past. From Prousts masterful enactment of the vast, kaleidoscopic and infinitely recursive processes of memory, to Nabokovs formal and
playful revisiting of the puzzles and perils of memory in his autobiography Speak,
Memory, to Becketts cynical revisiting of Proust in his 1930 essay and his later
presentation of characters who are trapped because they cannot remember or
trapped because they cannot forget, modernists have taken memory as a literary
focus and as a theoretical concern. The problem of memory is inescapable for these
authors since, as Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, The past is never dead.
Its not even past (92). Or to quote Becketts darker formulation in his essay on
Proust, There is no escape from yesterday, because yesterday has deformed us, or
has been deformed by us (13).
Invariably, and like a memory, an anthology is defined by what it chooses to
leave out as much as by the material included. By choosing to include a wide swath
of contemporary theories of identity, but to leave out the powerful literary/theoretical memory work of the last century, the editors leave out perhaps the most radical
insight into memory of the last century, the scandal that underpins both Nabokovs
fictionalized autobiography and Prousts autobiographical fiction: that memory, in
Nabokovs terms, that long-drawn sunset shadow of ones personal truth(24), is
itself a supreme fiction, and that in questions of memory, the literary and theoretical
are no more separable than the past and the present. In Theaetetus, Plato asks us to
imagine mistakes in memory as reaching into an aviary and accidentally grasping

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the wrong object, as one might get hold of a dove instead of a pigeon (199b). The
editors in this anthology have undertaken the very timely task of trying to grasp
the past and future of memory studies. Im just not sure they got the right bird.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues. London: John Calder, 1931.
Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1950.
Hoskins, Andrew, et al. Editorial. Memory Studies 1:1 (2008): 57.
Lethem, Jonathan, ed. The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory
Loss. New York: Vintage, 2000.
McConkey, James, ed. The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Nabokovs Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories. New York: Freeport Books, 1958.
Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. John McDowell, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973.
Wood, Harriet and A.S. Byatt, eds. Memory. London: Chatto and Windus, 2008.

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